LAUDERHILL — This could spell trouble for a group of pavement painters.

Just a block away from an elementary school, subcontractors goofed and stenciled the pavement with the letters “scohol.” Yep, you read that right: “scohol” instead of “school.”

The crew, working near the corner of 50th Street and Pine Island Road, seemingly failed to spell check its work on nearby signs for Banyan Elementary School.

Jerome Seleznow, 76, who lives just yards from the sign, said Friday that the entire neighborhood was dumbfounded by the mistake.

“It’s stupid, stupid, stupid,” said Seleznow. “A school sign [spelled wrong] next to the school. Stupid.”

The stenciling happened earlier this week by a subcontractor hired by a Broward County contractor, M. Vila & Associates, according to Brad Terrier, assistant director for the county’s Highway Construction and Engineering Division.

“We do review the work. Unfortunately it seems like we may have not gotten to that review as of yet,” Terrier said Friday afternoon, just hours after he was alerted to the error from news reports.

Calling the misspelling incident “very, very rare,” Terrier said a crew fixed the sign Friday afternoon.

“Our focus has been getting it corrected at this point,” Terrier said. “We are still trying to figure out some of the circumstances and looking into what the issues are.”

One of the crew members hired to fix the sign said Friday he thinks the error occurred because a single stencil containing the letters “H” and “O” was accidentally painted backward.

Romaine McRae, a stay-at-home mom who lives a few houses away from the sign, said the shoddy work conveys a wrong message to children.

“That was a really big boo-boo,” she said.

Broward County School District spokeswoman Nadine Drew said she was surprised by the error, adding she was glad officials were working to quickly correct it.

“I’m sure everyone would be happy with the fix,” she said.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time the word “school” has been misspelled near a school. In June 2009, a painter spelled the word the same way — “scohol” — on the pavement in a school zone at Goulds Elementary School in southwest Miami-Dade County.